Best way to digitise photographic film?

Benosaurus

Benosaurus

Well-Known Member
10+ year member
To start off with a bit of backstory, over Christmas I lost my grandfather. At the same time my grandmother, whilst still alive, kicking and as wonderful as ever, felt the tightening grip of her dementia and as a result now needs 24 hour care. This means their house must now be sold and me and my family have started the lengthy, meticulous task of sorting out the home they lived in for almost 60 years.

Today's mission was to sort out the large spare bedroom. After already stockpiling all the family photo albums I was shocked today to open a draw only to find hundreds more photos. Except this time they weren't your usual printed photos, they were cases of old fashioned photographic slides; something I'd not encountered before.

After looking through many of them, I was surprised to come across a slide of a tiger, then one of some penguins, and then another one of some giraffes. There were 9 of these zoo related slides in total (who knows there may be many more). I then saw they were labelled as 'Plymouth zoo'. These would have been taken in the early 1960s, before my grandparents moved back up to the West Midlands.

While not particularly precious or sentimental, these slides seemed quite interesting considering their age, quality, and the fact I'd not heard of Plymouth zoo before. I thought it would be good to share them on Zoochat, except I'm not sure how to do that.

I've tried scanning them in various ways on the scanner attached to my printer, but the resulting image always turns out extremely poor; small, dark and low resolution.

I wondered if anyone on here has encountered the same problem. Is there a particular technique I need to employ when scanning/editing them, or do I need to buy a dedicated slide scanner?

Any help greatly appreciated.
 
There are several scanners available that will scan slides, negatives and photos etc.. Most will let you adjust the quality of the picture, including focus, lighting etc..
 
You can purchase a film/slide scanner, or send them off to a photo lab that will do all of it for you. B&H photo would be a good place to purchase one, and they'd be able to help you pick the right one for what you want.
 
I used to work at a photo lab that does a lot of slide scanning. Best results are from a lab. If you only need to do a dozen or two dozen, that is the way to go. If you need to do a hundred or more it can get expensive. Still best to have a lab do it if you can afford it. If not, you can buy a slide scanner (as suggested) or use a digital SLR camera if the lens will let you focus close enough to fill most of the frame with the slide. You would need a way to backlight the slide though.
 
Thanks for your help everyone.

I think I'll start by trying the camera suggestion. It looks like I'll have to position the slide against a plain white surface, however it'll have to be positioned a few inches in front so as to let some daylight reflect through. I should then be able to focus in and take a decent picture, although I wonder if it'll need to be on macro.

I let you know how I get on.

If it doesn't work then I'll probably go and buy a slide scanner (but only after reading every online review first). Prices seem to start at around £50, which isn't too bad as eventually I'd like to get those hundreds of family photo slides converted too.
 
I have only just seen this thread. As you may know, I have a great many slides and quite a few negatives which I am sporadically scanning. I find it difficult to get the best results with a slide scanner, but for large numbers it is the best option.
If you are using a camera, I would suggest illuminating your slide/negative from behind with a diffuser between the light and the slide. But you will find that you need to take a lot of care to get consistent results. You will probably find yourself doing several tests and experiments, so don't expect wonderful results immediately and keep careful notes. Good luck!
 
I remember seeing quite a few of your uploaded slides and negatives on zoochat GL, which is how I knew it was possible to get quality results.

So far I've had some success with the camera method, but I know they could be a lot better. It's very much trial and error. I don't want to upload them to zoochat until I'm a least moderately happy with them.

Thank you for the light diffuser suggestion, I'd definitely like to try that next. The problem is that I don't have one. Do you think a DIY alternative like some tissue or tracing paper would produce the same effect?
 
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Benosaurus said:
Thank you for the light diffuser suggestion, I'd definitely like to try that next. The problem is that I don't have one. Do you think a DIY alternative like some tissue or tracing paper would produce the same effect?
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Yes, any diffuser which is white, translucent and of constant thickness will work, as long as it is well out of focus. I have used paper tissues and plastic from an old ice cream carton before now. Tracing paper would be fine too, but I would use 2 or 3 sheets or fold the paper for the same effect.
 
They are not at all good, but I have now uploaded the photos to the gallery.

In the end I found that, instead of using lamps and plain white surfaces etc., positioning the slides in front of a window, so as to use natural daylight as my light source, and then taking a photo of them on my SLR camera gave the best results.

To start with they were still far too brightly lit and transparent as I suspected. I tried using various DIY diffusers but found it very fiddly and inconsistent. My camera was trying to focus on the diffuser and you could see the texture of the diffuser through the image. However, weather-wise today was very overcast so I thought why not try again using the clouds a sort of giant natural diffuser and to my surprise it worked so much better.

Even so, I then uploaded them to my laptop and had to do a lot of editing using the basic photo editing software that comes with Windows 10 in order to get them looking better (this was very time consuming).

Still a lot of room for improvement.
 
Benosaurus said:
(this was very time consuming).
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I told you so ;)
They are not bad at all and they do have a period look as Chlidonias says. More complicated photo processing software might improve them a little - but it would consume much more time, and again I speak from experience.
 
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